Connected and Free: World Wide Web professionals at #WWW2012
FollowThis is the Part II from the highlights of the World Wide Web 2012 (#WWW2012) conference and here are some notes of mine but this time focusing on people, attendants who have been actively participating in the web professionals meeting and their impressions of the conference.
Beside numerous tracks, sessions, workshops, and tutorials – the #WWW2012 offered interesting keynotes by the leading and prominent professionals in Web industry, research, and policy. The main keynote speakers were Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of Web, Bernard Stiegler – a director of IRI (Innovation and Research Institute) at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, a professor at the University of Technology of Compiègne where he teaches philosophy, Chris Welty – a Research Scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York, and Neelie Kroes, a Vice President of the European Commission and European Digital Agenda Commissioner.
I asked some of the many colleagues, peers, and presenters about their preferred event on the World Wide Web 2012 conference, and what presentation/session/keynote/workshop made the best impression on them, and why. Here are some interesting thoughts.
New software paradigm, and Social Media in Response to a Crisis
I’ll start with volunteers at the conference since they had a great job to do and many of them are web researchers, students, and professors.
Jean-Tiare LE BIGOT: “I am currently studying telecommunications in Lyon (France) and attended the www2012 as a Volunteer. In my spare time, I try to create an archive of network status map. As a Volunteer, it has been quite tricky for me to choose and attend the presentations. Nonetheless, I had the luck to see all keynotes in the auditorium. As many of the attendees, I appreciated TBL talk on the values of the Web and also the debate of the following day. But the one I preferred was the one by Chris Welty. He talked about IBM’s Watson project and the steps which enabled Watson to defeat humans in the Jeopardy show. I really enjoyed the humor in his explanations when he showed us the biggest fails :). ”
Watson is an Artificial Intelligence system designed to answer real world questions as in the Jeopardy show or financial/medical world. During his presentation, Chris Welty stressed on point: Machine’s understanding is in no way the same as human’s. This is to illustrate this point that he showed us some failed answer which is obvious for a human being. An example:
Cindy Hui: I am a post-doctoral researcher at the Rutgers University. My research includes modeling and simulation, social networks, social computing, and disaster research. I presented a paper at Social Web for Disaster Management Workshop titled “Information Cascades in Social Media in Response to a Crisis: A Preliminary Model and a Case study.”
“There were so many interesting workshops and sessions at WWW2012 that covered such a variety of topics, but I mostly attended the ones that focused on social networks and social media since those are my areas of interest. In particular, I was very excited about the Social Web for Disaster Management and the Making Sense of Microposts workshops since there’s such a growing focus on how to analyze and make use of these community-driven, collective information from various social media platforms. It really brings together people from computer science, social science and policy practitioners, each contributing important pieces to the overall focus.
Radovanovic D (2012-04-28 00:09:06). Connected and Free: World Wide Web professionals at #WWW2012. Australian Science. Retrieved: Apr 26, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/interviews/connected-and-free-world-wide-web-professionals-at-www2012/
3 thoughts on “Connected and Free: World Wide Web professionals at #WWW2012”
Comments are closed.